Bibliocook: All About Food

The other night I was trying to take the Boyfriend out to dinner but, after ringing a few restaurants only to be informed that they were booked solid, I soon gave up that idea. That's what happens when you wait until 4pm on the Friday afternoon of a bank holiday weekend to try and make your reservations!

So it had to be something special from our own kitchen then. The only problem being that I wasn't due home until after 5pm and he would arrive less than an hour after me - not much time to do anything that involves long slow cooking. On the way home I wandered into the Fresh Choice supermarket in Merivale, looking for inspiration and it was there, in the freezer section, that I discovered it. Frozen prawns! Admittedly it doesn't sound like much to be excited about but these were no naked pink cooked little shrimp, but rather whole raw full-shelled fully-fledged prawns that - apart from their frozen state, obviously - looked ready to swim away given any opportunity. Not that they would have gotten any with the alacrity that I grabbed them and whizzed them home.

After defrosting - something which, according to the packet, could be sped up by immersing the prawns in cold water for just eight minutes - the cooking was just a matter of minutes. I heated some butter with a drop of olive oil (the mixture ensures that the butter doesn't burn too easily) in my big frying pan, added some chopped garlic, then the prawns and let sizzle until cooked. All the dish needed to finish it off was a squeeze of lemon juice and the prawns were ready for eating. I had cooked some pilau rice to go with accompany it but next time I think I'll just get some good crusty bread to mop up the delicious buttery juices from the pan. Rice isn't a good mopper although believe me, we tried! Finger bowls wouldn't be a bad idea, though, seeing as you have to peel the prawns one by buttery one. Deferred gratification is a wonderful stimulus to the appetite.

If I was going to have serve rice with the prawns again I might add chilli alongside the garlic and lime, instead of lemon, juice. Maybe it won't be long until this recipe is re-visited...

Continue reading "The simplest supper" »

Yesterday - 25 April - was Anzac Day. Now, in the days before I got myself the Kiwi Boyfriend, I mainly knew the word Anzac from some recipe for Anzac Biscuits that I had cooked when I was a kid. But I have been educated since then and now know that Anzac Day commemorates the date in 1915 when forces from this side of the world, fighting as part of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (hence the name Anzac) landed on the shores of the Gallipoli peninsula. The Gallipoli expedition has gone down in history as one of the most ill-fated campaigns of World War I. It had to be abandoned after nine months but, by that stage, almost one-third of the New Zealanders taking part had been killed.

The Anzac Biscuits of my childhood were devised by the women at home to send to their soldiers in Gallipoli. The biscuits - a mixture of oats, coconut, flour, butter and golden syrup - had to survive a long sea voyage (no airmail in those days!) hence the lack of eggs in the mixture. Despite their wartime origins, they're really very edible as I re-discovered last year. I intended on making the biscuits as a surprise for my Boyfriend who, in Ireland, had to work through what would normally be a bank holiday for him. A halt was put to my plans when I discovered that my local Tesco - never very well supplied - had run out of the desiccated coconut that I needed. There must have been more New Zealand and Australian people living in the area than I had realised! About two weeks later, when they finally got around to restocking, I was finally able to buy the coconut and make the biscuits. They might have been slightly out of date at that stage but they weren't any less tasty for the fact.

So, as this year's Anzac Day rolled around, and with me living in one of the countries particularly involved, I decided to revisit last year's recipe - until I realised that it couldn't be found. I know that I discovered the original on the internet but it seemed to be hiding this time round. I did, however, find this recipe on the New Zealand schools social studies site and, with a few tweaks, it turned out just fine although not up to the standard of the Boyfriend's mother's biscuits, of course. I must get after her for the family recipe!

Continue reading "Anzac Day…and biscuits" »

It was a friend's 30th birthday on Saturday and we were gathering at 5pm, in fancy dress, for a few drinks before heading over to a rugby match in Christchurch - Canterbury Crusaders vs South Africa's Cats. So there was a night of merriment before us - and probably a Sunday of its aftermath. There are several ways of protecting against a hangover, a couple of them being drink plenty of (non-alcoholic) liquids and don't go on the piss on an empty stomach. So I decided to make a pre-emptive strike on the hangover by feeding myself and the Boyfriend a big bowl of homemade soup before we left the house. It was a bit of a thrown-together recipe as I was busy making a birthday cake at the same time but it did it's job - and there was enough left over in the morning to give us a very substantial brunch. A dish not only for the night before but also for the morning after!

It should have been vegetable soup but I forgot to buy celery at the Saturday morning St Albans Market so the main vegetable in it was diced carrot. I threw in a red onion for sweetness, a couple of pieces of smoked ham hock to add flavour and a few handfuls of red lentils to thicken it, kept it bubbling away on the cooker while I got stuck into the cake and the end result was far better than the lack of attention should have warranted. Take out the hocks and give it a whiz with a hand-held blender if you're looking for a soup with a bit more finesse but, as it is, it has good body and texture.

Continue reading "Pre-emptive hangover soup" »

When you move to a new place, you've got to figure out what events are going on and, when I arrived in Christchurch in January, I was thrilled to discover that this South Island city is the home of Savour New Zealand, a foodie spectacular that happens every two years. Fortunately 2005 is one of those years and the event takes place from Friday 6 May to Sunday 8 May - dates now very firmly fixed in my diary!

Apparently the weekend is structured around suites of masterclasses with a total of four sessions per day and the choice of four classes per session. Just looking at the titles of the classes is mouth-watering - Cooking the Catch, Craving Chocolate, Knead the Dough and, one that looks especially fascinating to me because of my love of spices, Middle Eastern Magic. And that's only four of the total sixteen!

But it is the presenters of the classes, and the chance of getting to meet them, that really intrigues. Anthony Bourdain, the enfant terrible of the New York restaurant scene is the name that jumped out at me. I remember when his first biography, Kitchen Confidential, jolted the publishing - and restaurant - scene. It was a breathless, entertaining and sometimes disgusting overview of the dirty business that is food preparation. A Cook's Tour, his follow-up, was a wander through the food of the world in search of the perfect meal was ok but then he played his trump card and published the Les Halles Cookbook. This file of recipes, from New York's legendary Brasserie Les Halles where he is executive chef, shows that Bourdain can not only talk the talk, but he is able to walk the walk as well. Written in Bourdain's trademark aggressive style, the Les Halles Cookbook was an education - and proof that the man can actually do something other than eat, bitch and write about it!

Continue reading "Savour New Zealand" »

The first time that the Boyfriend's parents were coming to dinner, last summer in Ireland, was a bit of a challenge. It was intimidating enough having to meet the 'out-laws', as my Monaghan friend calls those to whom you are related by having a relationship with their son, but apparently the Boyfriend's father wasn't into spicy food. At that time, I was going though a phase where most things involved the addition of heat, whether in the form of a fresh or dried chilli or using some spicy hot sauce. So, the fact that I had to avoid my favourites made me do some serious thinking about what to cook. In the end, I decided to introduce them to that great Irish fish - the salmon. But, in order to minimise preparation and cooking on the day, I went towards the idea of making a savoury tart (sounds so much classier than quiche!).

As the Boyfriend was at the time working in Dun Laoghaire, he bought some beautiful salmon fillets from the pier so I poached them with a couple of bay leaves the day before we were going to have dinner. I also cooked the tart pastry base in advance, made, I must admit, from bought pastry. Being lazy, I find ready made pastry far more convenient and, I figure, it's either use bought pastry or never make savoury tarts! One of these fine days, when I have both my food processor and a proper freezer in the same country I intend on making several batches of pastry from scratch and freezing them so I can be an oh-so-organised cook. Well, I can dream at least...

Last weekend I had the same guests for dinner so, as it had been a while since our first meeting and the Boyfriend's father seemed to like my first attempt at a Salmon and Leek Tart, I decided to update the recipe. In my freezer I had several hot smoked Akaroa salmon fillets from a Vin de Pays food and wine tour I did earlier this year. I have often had cold smoked salmon, especially at home over Christmas time as part of the festive season, but never tasted hot smoked salmon before. The moment it passed my lips on the tour I was hooked. It has a more delicate flavour than the cold smoked variety and a lovely flaky texture. The friends that I was with were kind enough to buy me a bag of the fillets and that night a portion was put to delicious use with pasta and some cream. The sizeable remnants had ended up in the freezer as we were going away for a few days and stayed there, awaiting their fate, until the other night.

Although I specify hot smoked salmon in the recipe, you can - like I did the first time - use poached salmon or, alternatively, substitute cold smoked salmon. They're all very good in their different ways. I use a half-and-half mixture of cream and crème fraîche to give the filling a bit of bite but you can, of course, use all cream - or all crème fraîche . I also add some paprika, more for colour than flavour, and am sure I got this idea from Clotilde's exemplary Chocolate & Zucchini food blog but can't seem to track it down there now.

Continue reading "Hot Smoked Salmon and Leek Tart" »

Hmmm...sometimes it pays to study the labels of the jams you buy a little closer. After Saturday's trip to the St Albans Market I've discovered that I am eating not Black Bot Peach Jam but Black BOY Peach Jam. I had spent time searching for more information on the black bot peaches (not a good term to put into a search engine!) to no avail. But my search for black boy peaches came up trumps and it seems to be a fairly unusual type of peach with, according to one New Zealand website "dark reddy-grey skin. Bright port red and white streaky flesh." Sounds beautiful. Now, having been seduced by the jam (even if I was calling it by the wrong name) I'll have to look out for the peaches themselves, although I might have missed the season as they apparently ripen in late February.

The jam lady's produce is so fantastic that I had to go back to her and replace the first wee jar of Black Boy Peach Jam that I bought. While I was there I grabbed another jar of the delicious Lady Rose chutney as well. While I was examining her other jams and chutneys I heard her tell another customer that she was thinking of giving up the market for the winter. I'll have to get stocked up!

Continue reading "Jam and fruit issues" »

It's always the way, isn't it? You go to the supermarket and get a lovely bunch of yellow bananas. You eat one that day, take some to work for lunch the day after and even slice one on top of your muesli for breakfast. Then you forget about their existence. It's a fact of life that any fruit sitting around in the fruit bowl for more than three days becomes invisible - until it changes colour. Then the left-over bananas are no longer enticingly yellow but a kind of off-putting mottled browny black. There's nothing to do but compost them or throw them in the bin. But wait. Maybe there's another alternative?

There was a time here in New Zealand when I didn't have many recipe books. I still don't - but at least I've photocopies of the recipes I'm likely to use, courtesy of Christchurch's amazing library. Back in the dark days I pored over recipes on bags and boxes of ingredients. Sometimes these were rubbish, but not always, and one day I discovered this recipe for Chocolate Chip Banana Cake on the back of my Cadbury's Bournville Chocolate Chips box. I tasted a similar cake, warm from the oven, years ago at some food festival in Dublin's RDS. It's fragrant moist banana-ness, enriched with melting chocolate, was what I wanted to recreate here and it truly was a success. It didn't last long that first night and I've made it several acclaimed times since. The only problem is that I only have the cup measurements - if you have a set, use them. If not, get them. They will come in handy.

Continue reading "Good ways to get rid of black bananas" »

Although we're very solidly into autumn now here in New Zealand (autumn! In April! I'm still not quite getting my head around it) with little prospect of camping ahead, Nicola Saker's Blue Sky Kitchen: Creative Cookery For Kiwi Campers still caught my eye, despite the sickly image of the nuclear family that feature on the cover. Although not a Kiwi, I certainly am a camper cooking for a Kiwi so I figure I fall into Saker's target market. Anyway, I'm always looking for good things to cook over our wee gas burner (one-pot options only need apply) and this has plenty of great workable ideas for campsite cuisine.

Saker isn't one of these super-efficient, scary women that you sometimes see in campsite kitchens, whipping up a three-course meal with nothing but a billy can and tin opener. As she says herself, "I'm not a trained cook, and I'm not a hugely experienced camper" - sounds like someone on the same end of the scale as myself, then. The start of the book concentrates on good advice to do with food storage and, most importantly, food safety - something which is often forgotten or disregarded while camping. There are also handy lists of cooking utensils and stores for those who, unlike myself, dare to go under canvas with more than one generation.

Continue reading "Blue Sky Kitchen by Nicola Saker ***" »

There are lots of good things about being based in the little Christchurch suburb of St Albans - we're only about 30 minutes walk from the city centre, there is the choice of a couple of supermarkets nearby (Edgeware's bare basics Supervalue and the well stocked Fresh Choice in Merivale) and, best of all, every Saturday morning there's a market in English Park, just five minutes away from the house. The English Park Market (on Cranford Street from 9am-2pm) has little in common with the kind of food markets that I am used to in Ireland. There are few of the ready prepared gourmet snacks and dishes that characterise Dublin's Temple Bar Food Market at Meeting House Square, for instance. The English Park Market instead reminds me of Thursdays spent in the Square at Mitchelstown when I was a kid. There's lots of fruit and veg, with the odd few tatty kids' toys thrown in for good measure, but where Mitchelstown Market of old loses out is in the quality of produce available here.

Every week, come rain or shine, there's an organic vegetable and fruit stall with everything from the basic onions, carrots and garlic to silverbeet (a staple over here, like spinach but bigger and stronger in every way), organic and free-range eggs, four types of apple, two types of pear, some knobbly but interesting looking peppers and lots of potatoes. It's paper bags all the way - perfect for me as I've brought my shopping bags with me and I reuse the paper bags for our breadmaker bread.

So, after loading up there - it's nearly a one-stop shop, but not quite - there are lots of other stalls to explore and one of my first stops will have to be with the Cox's Orange Pippins man. It's a tiny stall with stacks of 2 kilo bags of Cox's at the very fair price of NZ$2. Not that I'm complaining, for his are the best apples that I've tasted by far. I choose to ignore the fact that he teased me about being too young to appreciate Cox's the first day I bought them. With my return each week for another bag, I think I've proven otherwise!

Continue reading "Marketing of a Saturday" »

Last night we had a couple of the Boyfriend's friends staying over - giving me the opportunity to cook dinner for more than the usual two people. Given that we were abroad in the Southern Alps for the day there wasn't much time for planning. I toyed with the idea of my usual, but easy and delicious, Chicken with Garlic and Lemon for dinner but a chance encounter with a menu in the café where we stocked up on caffeine while driving back from Lake Coleridge gave me the idea of doing a Mexican and cooking my cousin's Refried Beans. So there was a quick dash to the supermarket to stock up on the ingredients for the side dishes - Ruth's Refried Beans are tasty by themselves but half the fun of this meal is in piling your tortilla too high with guacamole, salsa and sour cream so that the beans start to fall out the bottom. Messy but fun! Some tortilla chips, if you have them in the house, are good for the purposes of trying to keep the food in the wraps or mopping up the excess afterwards.

This is a recipe that my cousin once cooked, in a whirl of activity, for me and her family at the end of a very long drive. After a bit of begging she emailed me the recipe and it's since become a staple in my own collection. Since I've started cooking and freezing my own beans here, Ruth's Refried Beans are never too far away. This time, as it happened, I had the kidney beans in the freezer and just had to supply the tins of white beans. Normally I - and my cousin - use black eyed beans but last night I only had one tin of cannellini beans and one of butter beans and it worked fine. If you're making this for vegetarians then use vegie stock but otherwise you can use chicken stock. I never use real stock for the Refried Beans instead relying on powder. I've found Vegeta Chicken Stock to be good here in New Zealand but, if at home in Ireland, Marigold Swiss vegetable bouillon powder can't be beaten.

One word of advice, though. I once cooked this for eight people and had to use three pans so, unless the frying pan you have is ginormous then it's easiest to stick for meals for two or four.

Continue reading "A Mexican-style meal" »

Unlike many foodie memoirs that add recipes on to the end of each chapter, Amanda Hesser - a New York Times writer - actually understands the many meanings of food. Cooking for Mr Latte, subtitled A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes, incorporates food as seduction and comfort, a means of binding together families at difficult times and celebrating the good occasions.

Ostensibly a diary of her relationship with a certain Mr Latte - aka New Yorker journalist Tad Friend - from first date through courtship, meeting each other's families and friends, to engagement and marriage, Hesse weaves food into the warp and weft of this book in a most intelligent way. The recipes that you end up with are not so much a collection of dishes as a journey through her life. While the story of the romance is flimsy enough, what enlivens the book and gives it substance are the recipes. It's the opposite of Nigella Lawson's Feast, not least that Cooking for Mr Latte only contains a handful of recipes while Feast is choc-full of them. While Hesser's interest in food makes this book interesting, the story of Lawson's life - and the reader's awareness of it - infuses the recipes in Feast with meanings far beyond that of a normal cookery book.

Continue reading "Cooking for Mr Latte by Amanda Hesser ***" »

Moving to a new city in a new country is not exactly the time for extravagant dinners à deux. When you're looking for work and trying to scrape the money together to rent and furnish a flat, it seems like wanton extravagance to splash out on sumptuous meals - unless, of course, your Bibliofemme friends club together to give you and your Boyfriend a voucher for a night of cocktails and food at Christchurch's Indochine on Cambridge Terrace. What better way to introduce yourself to a new city than with a meal in a restaurant you've never heard of?

First impressions were good - the elegant décor has a strong Eastern influence with black lacquered screens cutting the room into cosy, low-lit sections. The fact that our first cocktails took a while to arrive didn't start the night off on the best footing but this minor annoyance was quickly assuaged by the quality of the drinks. Indochine prides itself on its cocktail menu and there's plenty of choice here for the connoisseur. Even though we couldn't quite identify the contents of the Boyfriend's Mai Tai (other than rum), it had a kick like a mule and my Tropical Fizz wasn't much lighter so the alcohol, coupled with hunger, meant that a good mood prevailed ever before we set eyes on the food menu.

Indochine has an eclectic take on East-West fusion cooking with Dim Sum openers moving confidently from Grilled Fish Cakes with Cucumber Relish to Crunchy Oregano Chicken and a menu that incorporates French techniques and Chinese ingredients. The restaurant is peopled by friendly and mostly efficient staff who helpfully explain the menu after seeing your bewildered looks. It's not as complicated as it seems at first glance, however, once it is explained that starters and mains are distinguished by price rather than classification.

Continue reading "Restaurant review: Indochine, Christchurch" »

Wednesday, if I'm at home, is my day for baking and yesterday I decided that I needed to make some muffins. I have a little book called Marvellous Muffins by Robyn Martin for a couple of weeks now (another Trademe purchase!) but it's just been lazily sitting around the kitchen, not contributing to my life in any way. I took it down yesterday and leafed through it, trying to decide what kind of muffin sounded most appealing - and what I had the ingredients in the cupboard for!

My eye alighted on a recipe for Ginger Gem Muffins - but I wasn't in a very gingery mood. The recipe also needed golden syrup, not available in my pantry, but what I did have was a bottle of precious maple syrup, a present from my Canadian friend here in Christchurch. From that thought it was the work of mere seconds to decide to substitute the golden syrup with maple syrup and the ginger with cinnamon. But, when I was in the middle of making the muffins, I discovered that, come hell or high water, there was just no way I could get the top off the maple syrup bottle and so had to use an inferior "maple-flavoured" syrup instead.

The end results did suffer for the stuck bottle top. Instead of that deliciously rich depth that you get from maple syrup I could only taste cinnamon. Not that the muffins were inedible, in fact there's only a couple left, but they didn't turn out the way that I had hoped. Next time I'll have to put the Boyfriend's strength into action and defeat that bottle!

Note to self: a handful of pecans wouldn't go amiss the next time either.

Continue reading "Maple muffin making" »

Some days you just get feelings for things you want to cook. Others are about what you know has been sitting, reproachfully, in your cupboard for ages and making you feel that you have to cook it, now! So it was with lentils the other night. It was time to cook them - and, given my long standing hatred of potatoes, what better accompaniment to Cod with Thyme Oil?

I love lentils - love all pulses in fact, but that's a scribbling for a different day - especially in a vinaigrette dressing. And most especially if they are those small greeny-grey Puy lentils from the Auvergne in France. They are pricy, even in Ireland, but here they are rare and beyond the budget except, maybe, for special occasions. The lentils that I had to hand were common or garden brown lentils. They might not have the shape-keeping abilities of the fabulous Puy lentil (I've seen these described as "poor man's caviar" on occasion which seems to me to be stretching the point a little) but they're still a tasty option, especially when cooked with strong flavours.

Taking into consideration the fact that bacon and cod are perfect partners, I added some good dry cured bacon from the local butcher into the equation. But that was not enough for me - I had to have sauce - and so some cream was pressed into service, to mix through the lentils and bacon and give me the unctiousness that I was looking for. Otherwise a meal of fish and lentils would have felt all too healthy altogether. A marriage made in heaven? Well, not far from it - and the leftovers were perfect with rice the following day.

Continue reading "Lentil adaptations" »

Although fish has never been one of my favourite foods, this trip to New Zealand and the Kiwi dependence on fish and chips as a fast food while travelling is changing all that. Rather than just taking the scoop of chips, I'm a fully paid up member of the battered fish-eating fraternity now. While I'm content to leave the cooking of fish and chips to the chippers around the country, I have decided that it's time that I learned how to cook fish myself - especially given the largesse of the seas around New Zealand.

Saturday night was designated fish night this week but we were nearly thwarted from the outset when the great fishmongers shop in town turned out to be closed and the place we thought was a fishmongers wasn't. Thankfully we eventually managed to get our hands on some cod from Akaroa, a small fishing village near Christchurch, before we had to retire home and then there was only the job of figuring out how to cook it!

With a nod to Nigel Slater's recent Grilled Monkfish with Lemon Thyme in the Observer Food Monthly, I decided to cook the cod with a thyme oil made in my new, perfect pestle and mortar. But, rather than grilling or frying it, I made my life much easier by baking the cod - less fishy cooking smells that way - and the experiment was a success! The thyme oil gave the cod a lovely, herby flavour and it was a fabulous dish served with Roasted Vegetables and on top of Creamy Lentils with Bacon.

Continue reading "A nice piece of cod" »

Having been torn from my well-stocked kitchen back in Ireland, there are many items that I miss and recently I've been searching for a second hand pestle and mortar. Well, I do need some excuses for constantly going into the fantastic second hand shops - known as 'opp' or 'opportunity shops' - here! I've been able to get all my cake tins, roasting tins and many utensils replaced at a fraction of the cost of buying everything new. And they've much more character too - very important in a kitchen!

Today, though, the Boyfriend got thoroughly fed up with me going on and on about my latest holy grail, ie the pestle and mortar, so he upped and bought me one at the swanky department store in town. Not that I'm complaining, as this fine white porcelain piece is an upgrade on my beloved old marble pestle and mortar. But the purchase is not the end in itself - there'll have to be a shift in my thoughts about cooking as I'm now able to grind my own fresh spices, pound herbs into fragrant pastes and maybe that's a pesto-making evening I feel coming upon me?

I've been a fan of Nigella's writing since Nigel Slater (my other favourite cookery writer) gave his readers a tip-off about her first cookery book How To Eat. In fact, How To Eat was so beloved in our house that both I and my housemate had a copy - just in case we parted ways and one of us would end up living without it. Together with all Nigel's books and Darina Allen's impressive Ballymaloe Cooking School Cookbook, How To Eat sits on that section of the cookbook shelf that gets plundered on a regular basis.

While How To Be A Domestic Goddess is also a worthwhile and oft-used book, especially if I'm in the mood for night-time baking, neither Nigella Bites nor Forever Summer managed to set my world alight. Perhaps there was too much emphasis on Nigella the TV star and not enough on Nigella the cook. So it's a relief to pick (or heft) Feast up and realise that, freed from programme constraints, this is Nigella doing what she does best; writing gloriously evocative and approachable recipes. It's a dense tome of a book, which clocks in at almost 500 pages and has text that looks like it was sized down to make sure it didn't take over another couple of hundred pages.

Continue reading "Feast: Food That Celebrates Life by Nigella Lawson ****" »